Very quickly, here's some background. Back in 2006 you could count the venture capital firms in North America that invested in clean tech. There were probably 300. I can count them in North America now, and there are probably about six that focus on clean tech. In Canada, there are two or three and many define clean tech in a way that avoids the big stuff. They do energy, IT, or sensors. It's another version of ICT applied to the energy space, and they call it clean tech or IOT, industrial Internet of things, so you're making machines smarter.
I agree that's clean tech in the sense that it's efficiency, but it's not the big box stuff where you're making and moving energy around. Probably only two or three funds look at that. We are raising a second fund of $150 million. We hope to have that closed soon, but there are not a lot of us out there. ArcTern Ventures has primarily looked to strategics, we call them, to be our investment partners because there are very few investors in clean tech: 3M, GE, Siemens, the Kuwaiti Investment Authority, Enbridge, Iberdrola. These are big corporates.
You can't push on a string. If the venture community doesn't want to go to clean tech, they won't, but you can build an ecosystem where the risks and the reasons why venture investors fell on their faces in the early 2000s, which they did in Silicon Valley.... There are lessons we've learned and we're smarter, but you can also build an ecosystem that takes out some of those risks like SDTC in Canada and large commercial support for large commercial projects as well.
The state of venture capital for clean tech is not healthy. I don't think that's a secret, but for us it's a buyer's market. It's not a bad thing for us, but for the industry it's not good.